Researchers: Is this framework useful, or complete BS?[D]

Title: Researchers: Is this framework useful, or complete BS?

I'm working on a visual framework that tries to describe how research progresses from simply collecting information to producing genuinely original discoveries.

The image isn't intended to be a formal scientific model or a replacement for established research methodology. It's just an attempt to build an intuitive mental model that students and early-career researchers can use.

The basic progression is:

• Level 0: Raw copy-paste / plagiarism
• Level 1: Information compilation
• Level 2: Understanding & summarization
• Level 3: Comparison & evaluation
• Level 4: Interpretation & analysis
• Level 5: Applying knowledge to solve problems
• Level 6: Designing experiments that generate new evidence
• Level 7: Combining existing ideas in novel ways
• Level 8: Making an original contribution (new method, dataset, benchmark, algorithm, theory, etc.)
• Level 9: Breakthrough work that significantly changes a field
• Level 10: Paradigm-shifting discoveries that redefine how we understand a domain

Some examples I had in mind:

• Level 2: A literature review that accurately explains existing work.
• Level 4: An analysis explaining why Transformers scale better than earlier architectures.
• Level 5: Building and evaluating a better RAG pipeline for a real-world application.
• Level 6: Running controlled experiments to test whether a new training strategy improves performance.
• Level 7: Combining ideas from two different fields to create a new research direction.
• Level 8: Publishing a genuinely new architecture, benchmark, or algorithm.
• Level 9: Attention Is All You Need (Transformers) opening an entirely new direction for AI.
• Level 10: Think of discoveries on the scale of Einstein's relativity or Newton's mechanics—rare, civilization-level shifts.

I know this is subjective, which is exactly why I'm posting it here.

I'd really appreciate criticism from people who actually do research.

Some questions I'm hoping you can answer:

1. Is this progression fundamentally reasonable, or is it misleading?
2. Which levels don't make sense?
3. Are there levels that should be merged or split?
4. Am I confusing difficulty with originality?
5. What dimensions are missing? (Novelty, rigor, reproducibility, significance, etc.)
6. Is there an existing framework in academia that already captures this idea better?
7. If you were mentoring a new PhD student, would you find something like this useful, or would you throw it away?

Please don't worry about being polite—I genuinely want to know whether this is a useful teaching tool or just academic nonsense.

If it's flawed, I'd much rather understand why than keep refining something built on a bad premise.